Injury Recoup

[AndyP]

Teams get money back if a player is injured? Teams only get money back in other sports on non-guaranteed contracts. Take football for example. Guy signs a 5 year 20M contract with a 7M signing bonus. The only money in that contract that is a guarantee is the signing bonus, after year 1 the team can cut that player and not owe him the remainder. Even in football, if you cut the guy because of an injury, that player could still be owed money, hence why teams wait till players are medically cleared to cut them. In Basketball and Baseball, the contracts are guaranteed and don't have that luxury.

That's not true. Teams have insurance policies on most major contracts they sign. For example, when Joe Nathan blew out his arm for the Twins in ST two years ago they had insurance on his contract in the event that he had such an injury.

It didn't pay off the entire injury, but it paid a large percentage of it. This is from a Jason Stark article about it:

Twin peeks: We've heard from two league sources that the Twins have an insurance policy on Nathan's contract that figures to reimburse them a "significant" chunk of the $11.25 million their closer has coming this season. So that's more than enough money to allow them to chase a closer at the trading deadline if they think they need one.

So what CDawg is suggesting is realistic, but teams would have to pay for the insurance.